The Complete Short Stories (61 page)

‘You’ll have to,’ he
said.

Elizabeth wrote her a
letter which Raymond intercepted:

‘Dear Lou Raymond is
asking if we have any blacks in the family well thats funny you have a coloured
God is not asleep. There was that Flinn cousin Tommy at Liverpool he was very
dark they put it down to the past a nigro off a ship that would be before our
late Mothers Time God rest her soul she would turn in her grave you shoud have
kept up your bit to me whats a pound a Week to you. It was on our fathers side the
colour and Mary Flinn you remember at the dairy was dark remember her hare was
like nigro hare it must be back in the olden days the nigro some ansester but
it is only nature. I thank the almighty it has missed my kids and your hubby
must think it was that nigro you was showing off when you came to my place. I
wish you all the best as a widow with kids you shoud send my money as per usual
your affec sister Elizabeth.’

‘I gather from
Elizabeth,’ said Raymond to Lou, ‘that there
was
some element of colour
in your family. Of course, you couldn’t be expected to know about it. I do
think, though, that some kind of record should be kept.’

‘Oh, shut
up,’
said
Lou. ‘The baby’s black and nothing can make it white.’

Two days before Lou left
the hospital she had a visitor, although she had given instructions that no one
except Raymond should be let in to see her. This lapse she attributed to the
nasty curiosity of the nurses, for it was Henry Pierce come to say goodbye
before embarkation. He stayed less than five minutes.

‘Why, Mrs Parker, your
visitor didn’t stay long,’ said the nurse.

‘No, I soon got rid of
him. I thought I made it clear to you that I didn’t want to see anyone. You
shouldn’t have let him in.’

‘Oh, sorry, Mrs Parker,
but the young gentleman looked so upset when we told him so. He said he was
going abroad and it was his last chance, he might never see you again. He said,
“How’s the baby?”, and we said, “Tip-top.”‘

‘I know what’s in your
mind,’ said Lou. ‘But it isn’t true. I’ve got the blood tests.’

‘Oh, Mrs Parker, I
wouldn’t suggest for a minute …’

‘She must have went with one of they
niggers that used to come.’

Lou could never be sure
if that was what she heard from the doorways and landings as she climbed the
stairs of Cripps House, the neighbours hushing their conversation as she
approached.

‘I can’t take to the
child. Try as I do, I simply can’t even like it.’

‘Nor me,’ said Raymond. ‘Mind
you, if it was anyone else’s child I would think it was all right. It’s just
the thought of it being mine, and people thinking it isn’t.’

‘That’s just it,’ she
said.

One of Raymond’s
colleagues had asked him that day how his friends Oxford and Henry were getting
on. Raymond had to look twice before he decided that the question was innocent.
But one never knew … Already Lou and Raymond had approached the adoption
society. It was now only a matter of waiting for word.

‘If that child was mine,’
said Tina Farrell, ‘I’d never part with her. I wish we could afford to adopt
another. She’s the loveliest little darkie in the world.’

‘You wouldn’t think so,’
said Lou, ‘if she really was yours. Imagine it for yourself, waking up to find
you’ve had a black baby that everyone thinks has a nigger for its father.’

‘It
would
be a
shock,’ Tina said, and tittered.

‘We’ve got the blood
tests,’ said Lou quickly.

Raymond got a transfer
to London. They got word about the adoption very soon.

‘We’ve done the right
thing,’ said Lou. ‘Even the priest had to agree with that, considering how
strongly we felt against keeping the child.’

‘Oh, he said it was a
good thing?’

‘No, not a
good
thing.
In fact he said it would have been a good thing if we could have kept the baby.
But failing that, we did the
right
thing. Apparently, there’s a
difference.

The Thing about
Police Stations

In the first place the boy did not wish to
go to the police station to inquire for his aunt’s little spotted dog. He was
sorry she had lost the dog, but he didn’t like police stations.

‘I’ve got a thing about
police stations,’ he explained.

‘Your generation has things
about everything,’ she said, ‘and the only way to conquer your thing about
police stations is to go into one.’

He felt sure this was a
fallacy. He was eighteen. He had already met a girl who had failed to get over
her thing about post offices. But his aunt was upset about the dog, and so he
went.

It was a dark afternoon
in the dead of January. He took a long long time to come to the end of the icy
zig-zag lanes which led across the countryside to the police station. The lanes
crossed land which had been quarried and abandoned about twenty years ago.
Nature had never quite reclaimed itself here. In summer, it was true, when they
were covered with tall tough grass and off-white patches of ladies’ lace, those
gaping pits had an appearance of normality. But in winter they were black
thorny wounds in the earth. He feared them greatly and secretly, and always
walked stealthily there, so that he would not be noticed by these terrible quarries.

His aunt always made
light of that walk along the quarry lanes: ‘Only a five minutes’ walk.’

He didn’t know what she
meant by five minutes. Anyhow, the sky was dark by the time he reached the
police station, the afternoon was gone.

He entered, and saw two
uniformed men sitting behind a high counter. One of them was writing in a book.
For a long long time neither of them took any notice of his presence, and he
wondered if he ought to cough, or say something. Should he say, ‘Excuse me, it’s
about a little white dog with black spots?’ Or should he say, ‘May I speak to
the officer in charge?’ He remembered that when he was a schoolboy one of his
teachers used often to say, ‘Discretion is the better part of valour.’ He kept
his peace and waited.

The policeman who was
not writing in the book was resting his elbows on the counter, he was resting
his chin in his hands and his eyes on mystical space. He was big-featured and
broody, like a displaced Viking.

Behind the men was a
door, the top half of which was frosted glass. Someone was behind it. The young
man could see the shadow moving.

At length, a loud voice
came from behind this door, ‘No. 292 this way! No. 292 this way!’

Immediately the Viking
straightened up. The other policeman threw down his pen. They lifted the
end-flap of the counter and together approached the boy.

‘No. 292 this way,’ said
the Viking to the youth. ‘No. 292 this way, the other repeated.

He was surprised.
Clearly they expected him to follow them and he was about to open his mouth to
protest when the adage ‘Discretion is the better part of valour’ seized his brain
together with ‘Speech is silver but silence is golden.’ So he said nothing. But
as he was offended by the tone of their address, he did not move. The Viking
took him by the wrist and pulled him into the inner room, the other policeman
following.

There were now three
policemen. They sat on plain hard chairs on three sides of a table, while the
young man stood on the fourth side, being watched by them.

After a long long time
the third policeman, the one who had first called ‘No. 292 this way,’ made a
note on some papers. Then he looked up and addressed the youth in his loud
voice:

‘There has been an
unspeakable crime. Guilty or Not Guilty?’

He remembered ‘Nothing
venture, nothing win’ and spoke up.

‘What crime?’ he said.

‘Use your logic, please,’
the policeman said. ‘We cannot speak about a crime which is unspeakable. Guilty
or Not Guilty?’

‘I demand a proper
trial,’ said the boy. This was foolish, for what he should have said was, ‘I
think there has been some misunderstanding’ . But he did not think of this in
the stress of the moment, and in fact he felt a little proud of himself for
thinking to demand a proper trial.

The Viking jumped to his
feet immediately. ‘No. 292 for trial!’ he shouted. A door at the far end of the
room opened and three more policemen entered. They put handcuffs on the
prisoner and led him away along a lot of corridors. After walking for at least
half an hour they came to a cell. The boy was locked in.

All that night he
thought to himself that his aunt would surely come in the morning and clear up
the misunderstanding. He fancied she must already have applied for him at the
police station, but evidently had found it closed.

In the morning a
policeman unlocked his cell.

‘Crust and water for 292,
he said, thrusting a crust of bread and a mug of water into the prisoner’s
hands. The policeman disappeared before the boy could speak to him.

Some hours later the
head policeman arrived, carrying some papers. He was very suave in his manner.
Quickly, before he could speak, the young man put in, ‘I wish to see my aunt.
Has she been inquiring for me?’

He bowed. ‘There
was
a
lady,’ he said, ‘about a spotted dog.’

‘That’s my aunt. Did she
inquire for me?’

The chief of police
bowed. ‘I believe so. But we explained that you preferred to stand your trial.’

‘There’s been a
misunderstanding.

‘It will be cleared up
at the trial. I have come to tell you that the trial will take place in three
months’ rime. We detain you till then.’

‘That’s irregular,’ the
youth said smartly. ‘There’s a Habeas Corpus Act —’

The policeman bowed. ‘It
is obsolete,’ he said.

And so, for three months
the young man of eighteen watched the sky above the roof behind the high
window, dreadfully barred. The walls of his cell were pinky-grey, and there
were hundreds of rats. The aunt said later, when he told her of the rats, that
this couldn’t be. The police are nothing if not hygienic in their habitat,’ she
said. Maybe so, but still there were hundreds of rats.

Needless to say the boy
was found guilty at the trial. His aunt, who had in the meantime found her
little dog, gave evidence to the effect that he was incapable of an unspeakable
crime, being incapable of almost everything. But the Prosecution pointed out
that a) her evidence was suspect as she was a blood relation and b) it was impossible
to admit evidence in connection with a crime too unspeakable to speak about.
The judge had a square face with double-lens glasses. All the jury were policemen
with double lenses. The youth wondered afterwards if he should have shouted out
in Court, ‘I am innocent of the unspeakable crime,’ but perhaps they wouldn’t
have believed him.

He was sent away to the
salt mines of somewhere for three months. Since his return the aunt kept on
saying, ‘It could all have been avoided if you had only handled the situation
with aplomb.’ Anyway, that is what happened, and her nephew still has a thing
about police stations.

A Hundred and
Eleven Years Without a Chauffeur

Grandmothers, great-grandfathers and all
antecedents. Don’t forget they lived ordinary lives, had pains, went to work,
talked, busied themselves, had sex — full days and full nights as long as all
that lasted. I see no reason to drool over them. They did not drool over us.
They thought, if they wanted and could, of the future, the generations to come,
but only in the most general terms, obviously, in the nature of things.

When they wrote memoirs
and letters, we know that is not the whole story. When they left only their
photographs and a few imputed sayings and habits, still less have we got the whole
story. We have their birth and marriage records and their tombstones in some
country churchyard, as in the case of my forebears.

When it came to
producing photographs for my biographer, Joe, there was little to go on. I hadn’t
looked them over for at least twenty years. They had been tucked into a drawer
in a spare bedroom together with a tiny musical box that still played a tinkly
tune when wound up, a few old reels of black cotton, a tin box of Venus pencils
(unused, a very useful find). There was also a piece of stone from an
excavation of antiquity, but which? Other items.

I took out the
photographs and spread them out on a table. Is that all? I could have sworn
there had been more. In fact, I knew there had been more. Where were they all?
Who on earth could have gone off with my old fusty photos, what use would
anyone have had for them?

I looked at the
photographs one by one, to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. People, even one’s
friends, do go off with things. But their main objects of acquisition are books.
Guests go off with books out of the guestroom, but not photos, not old photos
of dull people of modest means.

Gladys was there, an
aunt on my maternal side married to my mother’s brother Jim. Jim was sitting
with a hand on his knee, a watch-chain across his belly, while Gladys stood
beside him, one hand on his shoulder. Beside Gladys was a photographer’s prop
in the form of a pillar surmounted by a bunch of flowers. Date,
circa
1880.

Next, Mary-Ann, Nancy,
Maud and my great grandmother Sarah Rowbottom, who lived to 105, and here shows
that possibility already at sixty-five. They are wearing their best frocks,
tight corseted waists, prominent busts, as breasts were called, lots of rows of
lace and always a locket hanging round their neck with God knows whose photos,
whose locks of hair, enclosed in those small breast-warmed cases. Mary-Ann, who
was the first to get married, wore a dark brooch. Their hair was done up, all
in order. Lower middle class of those days, aspiring. They were corn dealers
and managed quite well.